Posted
by
timothy
on Monday August 22, 2011 @02:40PM
from the worth-it-at-twice-the-price dept.

CWmike writes "Taking advantage of Hewlett-Packard's departure from the tablet and smartphone market, Microsoft has offered webOS developers free phones, tools and training to create apps for Windows Phone 7. Brandon Watson, Microsoft's senior director of Windows Phone 7 development, made the offer on Twitter on Friday, and has been fielding queries ever since. 'To Any Published WebOS Devs: We'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,' Watson said a day after HP's announcement. Before Friday was out, Watson said he had received more than 500 emails from interested developers, and later, that the count was closing in on 600."

And then in two years we'll deprecate the existing API, change the language specs just enough to break your apps...

How was this comment modded insightful? If anything that Microsoft is criticized for is usually the opposite of what you claim. This is the first time I've ever heard complaints that Microsoft changes their API too frequently.

As with the Xbox, if MS is willing to throw a lot of money at the problem, they might survive. Frankly if Xbox was a separate company, they would have declared bankruptcy by now. Unlike the Xbox, MS has to rely on OEMs and they could choose to abandon WP7 for Android quite easily (barring patent wars).